Lessons from MAD MEN’s Matthew Weiner

This past week I’ve been working on a full Feng Shui makeover of my office, filing away papers that had accumulated over the past two years. I found over a dozen Moleskin soft notebooks, some dating back to 2008, which I had been carrying with me everywhere, scribbling down to do lists, notes from events, gallery exhibits, and highlights from books I’ve been reading.

Revisiting these notebooks has been like going through a time machine.

Amongst the gems I found, were notes from a February 2011 masterclass with MAD MEN creator Matthew Weiner.

– Weiner loves Antonioni‘s “La Notte” – he finds it incredible to have a whole film that rests on the question: “Why doesn’t my lover look at me the way he used to?” As opposed to “How do we get the gold out of Cairo?”

– Weiner made everybody watch Chabrol‘s “Les Bonnes Femmes” – the characters feel like real people, as opposed to Hollywood characters, who are too stylized. He urged the crew not to fix imperfections in the sets and costumes. “I want to see the ugliness of life that we don’t see.”

– Speaking of the 1960s vs. today, Weiner said that “whatever has changed, human nature has not changed.” It’s about the experience of the other. The default setting is white men vs. the rest. People bonding over hating someone else (racism, sexism…)

– On MAD MEN, Weiner has many first time writers and directors. He concluded the masterclass by saying, “I like to give people a chance.”